Erik Baekkeskov

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Social and Political Sciences

The need for scientific expertise in combination with a strategy built on individual responsibility, rationality, and “common sense” permeated the main Swedish national narrative, supporting a noncoercive strategy that clearly deviated from what much of the world did. This narrative was primarily promoted by the Public Health Agency of Sweden (PHAS...

Steering against superbugs is about navigating barriers and opportunities in the global governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The book’s nineteen chapters offer a broad range of social science perspectives, structured around six AMR governance themes. These include: (i) how AMR challenges are framed and conceptualized internationally; (ii)...

Steering against superbugs is about navigating barriers and opportunities in the global governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The book’s nineteen chapters offer a broad range of social science perspectives, structured around six AMR governance themes. These include: (i) how AMR challenges are framed and conceptualized internationally; (ii)...

Steering against superbugs is about navigating barriers and opportunities in the global governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The book’s nineteen chapters offer a broad range of social science perspectives, structured around six AMR governance themes. These include: (i) how AMR challenges are framed and conceptualized internationally; (ii)...

What is the relationship between political stability, trust, and source effects on support for public policies? In this article, we examine how source type (and the trust respondents have in different sources) impacts support for new policies and the degree to which this impact is moderated by political stability. This article reports the results o...

Denne artikel fremsætter en model for tre former for videnskabelighed, som kan indgå i dannelsen af offentlig politik: viden, metoder og eksperter. Artiklen opsummerer politologisk litteratur, som fokuserer på og udvider forståelsen af de forskellige videnskabeligheder og deres politiske anvendelse. Den argumenterer for, at forskelle mellem vidensk...

The study of ideas and crisis in public policy and administration has generated two literatures with shared interests, but often distinct approaches. In this Symposium introduction, we argue that crisis studies and the ‘ideas school’ have much to learn from each other. To facilitate cross‐pollination, this article reviews key insights from the two...

We trace the evolution of understandings and applications of policy capacity through a meta-analysis of studies in the policy and administrative sciences that focus on definitions or conceptualizations of capacity, capability or competency, political resources and the functioning of policy systems, and variables or mechanisms leading to outcomes. W...

This paper analyses public leadership in Scandinavia during the latest two pandemics, the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, by compiling and contrasting national proxies of media visibility among pandemic response actors. Concretely, the paper taps into key media databases to develop indicators of how often national l...

COVID-19 outbreaks forced governments into epic policy choices conciliating democratic legitimacy and science-based policies. We examine how pervasive crises like this pandemic shape public discourses, proposing two ideal-types that discourse may tend toward. One is pluralism, which includes authoritative voices that represent viable alternative po...

The WHO, FAO, and OIE (the Tripartite) promote One Health (OH) as the guiding frame for national responses to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Little is known, however, about how much national action plans (NAPs) on AMR actually rely on the OH measures outlined by the Tripartite. The paper investigates attention to OH through a systematic content an...

This article goes beyond the study of speech acts to investigate the process of securitization during a health crisis. The article introduces the concept of ‘expert-led securitization’ to account for situations when experts dominate the administrative process that translates a securitizing speech act into extraordinary public policy. Expert-led sec...

Recent scholarship posits that ambiguous (‘polysemic’) ideas are effective for coalition building between diverse stakeholders: their capacity to be interpreted differently attracts different interests. Hence, in search of political solutions to ‘wicked’ and similarly complex problems, deploying polysemic ideas would be critical to effective policy...

In this article, we utilize the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management. By selecting a subset of cases involving episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, we conduct a plausibility prob...

From the 1990s and onward, governments and global health actors have dedicated resources and policy attention to threats from emerging infectious diseases, particularly those with pandemic (i.e., global epidemic) potential. Between April 2009 and August 2010, the world experienced the first pandemic in this new era of global preparedness, the 2009...

This paper investigates the genealogy of social science research into antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by piecing together the bibliometric characteristics of this branch of research. Drawing on the Web of Science as the primary database, the analysis shows that while academic interest in AMR has increased substantially over the last few years, socia...

Transaction cost attributes, such as the complexity of the product being purchased, shape the risk that government contracts will fail. When transaction cost risks are particularly strong, a common prescription is to avoid contracting altogether or, if it is unavoidable, to spend additional resources on contract management activities. This article...

Antimicrobial resistance represents one of the world’s most pressing public health problems. Governments around the world have—and will continue to—develop policy proposals to deal with this problem. However, the capacity of government will be constrained by very low levels of trust in government. This stands in contrast to ‘medical scientists’ who...

This study demonstrates that countries responded quite differently to calls for healthcare workers (HCWs) during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014. Using a new dataset on the scale and timing of national pledges and the deployment of HCWs to states experiencing outbreaks of the virus disease (principally, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone),...

What logics steer policy-making when science really leads? This is a core issue for contemporary policy improvement doctrines such as innovation, evidence-based policy, and experimental governance. In particular, the paper reviews two ideal-type logics of the impact of new information on policy, derived from epistemic community, policy learning, ne...

China and other authoritarian states notoriously keep mum about disasters. Yet two recent but dissimilar Chinese responses to infectious disease epidemics show that authoritarian crisis management can shift from secrecy to openness. China maintained prolonged secrecy during 2003 SARS, yet was open from day one about 2009 H1N1 flu. To explore why, t...

When important public issues are debated, many options for government action should be subjected to serious reflection. Constrained discussions over policy options may hamper democratic legitimacy and accountability, and produce decisions that ignore relevant reasons and facts. Hence, constrained deliberation has important consequences for knowledg...

Why do similar countries facing the same threat respond differently? To throw light on this question, this article analyses Dutch and Danish vaccinations against the 2009 H1N1 ‘swine’ influenza pandemic (most-similar cases with different outcomes). Policy-making in the cases intersected the politics of crisis management (including risk management a...

URL: http://rudar.ruc.dk/bitstream/1800/25384/1/Rapport_om_transaktionsomkostninger._Offentlige_myndigheders_udbudsomkostninger_final_version_.pdf

Reputation-seeking can explain some decisions of U.S. federal agencies. However, it has remained unclear whether it could be used in the European context where agencies have proliferated in national and regional governance in the past few decades. This article shows that reputation-seeking can occur at autonomous agencies in the European context. A...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to show that 2009 H1N1 "swine" influenza pandemic vaccination policies deviated from predictions established in the theory of political survival, and to propose that pandemic response deviated because it was ruled by bureaucratized experts rather than by elected politicians. Design/methodology/approach: Focu...

This article shows that variations in how two UK governments justified contracting-out (issue framing), combined with shifting sector-derived incentives for union activism (sector character), can help explain the extent of contracting-out. Janitorial service, an activity of the UK government that should have been ‘low hanging fruit' for its prolifi...